Musical Reasoning without a Mind’s Ear: A Comparative Case Study

Audiation, defined as the capacity to internally hear and manipulate music, has long been considered central to musicianship. Traditional frameworks treat audiation as central to musicianship and assume that many core rehearsal and preparation tasks depend on inner hearing. The phenomenon of anauralia offers an opportunity to test this assumption. This study employs a qualitative, comparative case study design with a phenomenological orientation. Three classically trained musicians, each meeting a conservative screening criterion for markedly reduced or absent auditory imagery on the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, participated in semi-structured interviews incorporating reflective tasks. Data were analyzed through within-case narratives and cross-case thematic synthesis. Participants reported four recurring strategies that supported internal musical construction without inner hearing: kinesthetic scaffolding, reliance on visual and notational representations, linguistic-verbal mediation, and reflective harmonic reasoning. These approaches emerged organically, as participants began training without awareness of their lack of auditory imagery. Together, these findings provide qualitative evidence that auditory imagery is not necessary for several forms of musical reasoning and rehearsal. They also characterize alternative representational resources that can support musical cognition in its absence. The study carries pedagogical implications for recognizing cognitive diversity in music education and motivates future behavioral and neurocognitive tests of when, and with what limits, imagery-independent strategies yield comparable musical outcomes.